Early last
week I heard a little contribution on the radio about the fact that inventors a
lot of the time don’t actually ‘invent’ something, but frequently just find a
way how to make use of what had already been there before. Electricity, for
example, has been around since the beginning of time, but only in 1780 was it
discovered, and in 1854 the light bulb was invented so that humankind could
actually turn electricity to use in the form of light. The radio-blurb then went
on to mention water- and steam-power, refrigerators, x-rays. Basically, the
author claimed, inventing is really only discovering and copying of something
that has been there, and finding a solution as to how this could be put to use
for humankind.
Immediately,
I thought of my pictures of ‘found art’. These usually aren’t what would
qualify as ‘art’ when looked at the context in which they were taken. But a
different way of looking at those contexts, frequently a close-up look – most
of the time not even photo-shopped! – changes the original, and voilà, a
picture of art.
These are
my ten most recent pieces of found art, all taken since Saturday, according to the dates on my memory card on the camera:
Michelangelo
supposedly once said that he did not “make” his statues, and I think I remember
that this remark was made with regard to his giant statue “David”.
 |
| picture taken from here |
Instead, he
just "released" it from the stone that had been surrounding the sculpture, the
stone somehow telling Michelangelo where to put the chisel and guiding him in how to direct it. (As a
youngster I saw a TV documentary in which they said the bent left knee is due to the
fact that the marble was not a perfectly rectangled block when Michelangelo got
it, but that it had a ‘dent’ in that side. Bits of information like this stay
with you a lifetime!) Anyway – perhaps it is the same with fabric or textile or
fibre art. It is there always. All it needs is somebody to sit down and actually
release it from a hidden existence. So is it creation, or invention, or copying?
And what about copyright...?
No comments:
Post a Comment